In recent years, a number of high profile acts of violence and other crises have occurred in public school and other institutional settings, gaining the attention of media and large segments of the public. For this and other reasons, a large and growing number of municipalities have required that public school administrators create detailed crisis response plans and make them available in each school and district office for use during a crisis. Crisis response plans are written procedures with explicit intent to protect and sustain life, reduce emotional trauma, assist in emotional recovery from trauma, and minimize personal injury and/or damage to the school facilities in the event of a crisis incident. Given the uncertainties often facing officials responsible for the safety of large groups of people, the preparation of such crisis plans represents a sensible course of action, even in those school districts where such crisis response plans are not mandated, or in other public and private institutions.
Unfortunately, school administrators and other public officials have many duties, not the least being, creating and working with considerable amounts of paperwork—paperwork that includes creating, maintaining and publishing crisis response plans. Crisis response plans usually require the participation of a number of individuals, and require that data be gathered relating to procedures to be followed by those individuals, lists of needed supplies, contact information for outside resource organizations, lists of vital records, details of locations for evacuation purposes, and any additional documents. Thus, the preparation of a comprehensive crisis response plan often involves the use of significant time and expense which would otherwise be devoted to other projects.
In an effort to address this problem, school administrators have used generalized business software, such as word processors, spread sheets and database programs to aid in developing crisis response plans. Clearly, the use of such well known tools may enhance productivity and increase the efficiency of any project as compared with manual entry, organization and distribution of crisis data.
Unfortunately however, none of these computerized tools are specifically customized to the creation, maintenance and distribution of crisis response plans. Thus for example, none of these tools actually guide users through the plan creation process. Furthermore, while these tools each aid in the completion of particular aspects of the crisis planning process (e.g., word processors for the creation of documents and data, database packages for the storage and organization of data), they are not integrated. Accordingly, users and Information Technology professionals may expend time and effort integrating and making compatible data created in differing computing environments. Moreover, in many schools and other institutions using crisis response plans, the entire crisis response plan is not located in a central location with many additional resource documents generally located in other places. When revisions to the crisis response plans are necessary, it often requires a major effort to make the changes, all of which are done manually.
Thus, what is needed is an integrated user-friendly automated system and process customized to aid in the creation, maintenance and distribution of crisis response plans, not only for schools, but for nay institution for which response plans are appropriate.